From Bodies to Branches, Unconventional Instancing on FX's Shōgun | Timmy Lundin and Heinrich Lö...

Join Timmy Lundin and Heinrich Löwe from Important Looking Pirates as they unveil the innovative techniques employed in the FX series Shōgun. Discover how they harnessed the power of instancing in unusual ways to render massive crowds and rip apart a forest during a large-scale landslide, maintaining full geometric complexity. All while overcoming limitations commonly associated with instancing workflows, such as non-deforming or repeating geometry.

Heinrich Löwe was born in 1980 in Stralsund, Germany, and pursued a Master of Engineering Sciences in Computational Informatics at Hamburg University of Technology, graduating in 2012. His professional journey began at Stereolize in Munich from 2000 to 2002, followed by a long tenure at Sehsucht in Hamburg from 2002 to 2022. He is currently working as a CG TD at ILP in Stockholm. He has been happily married since 2016 and has two seven-year-old children. In his free time, he enjoys kitesurfing and swimming.

Timmy Lundin Timmy Lundin is a CG Supervisor at Important Looking Pirates with a long-standing love affair with proceduralism, optimization, and problem-solving. He began as a one-man FX band at a small Swedish studio before moving to Rising Sun Pictures, where he contributed to FX, Lighting, and Tool building during their transition to a Houdini-based lighting pipeline. Since then, he has been helping ILP through the same transition while CG Supervising shows, designing and implementing various Houdini pipeline tools and workflows, and helping artists develop their skills—all while consistently nagging any fellow pirate missing the Geometry Spreadsheet from their default desktop layout.